Arratia Beer is pleased to present The Casting and De Grote Boodschap, two new video works by Omer Fast.

The works will be on view simultaneously in two different spaces.The Casting will be presented at S-Bahnbogen 49 and De Grote Boodschap will be screened at S-Bahnbogen 47, both located at Holzmarktstr 15-18, Berlin. Originally commissioned by Museum Moderner Kunst (MUMOK), Vienna, The Casting is a four channel video installation based on conversations the artist recorded last year with a young US Army sergeant before his second deployment in Iraq.

”Over several days –remarks Fast- the sergeant told me two different stories and I chopped them and braided them together into one. The first story takes place in Bavaria and involves a date with a German girl who’s into speed and self-mutilation. The second story takes place outside Baghdad and involves a roadside bomb and a tragic mistake. These two stories were edited into a script, which was given to a group of actors to interpret in a series of silent tableaux. As an installation the work deals with its subject matter in terms of pairs: interviewee and interviewer; memory and the movies, love and death, routine and accident".

Meanwhile filmed on-location in Mechelen, Belgium the single channel video De Grote Boodschap (The Big Message) adroitly plays with the conventions of the television serial depicting the overlapping and simultaneously contradictory narratives of various Flemish pairs that are caught in a time loop. As each character tries to understand what has happened and what is about to take place, the movement of the camera and the motivations of the other characters conspire against him/her and upset the viewer’s expectations.

Omer Fast (born in 1972 in Jerusalem, Israel) lives and works in Berlin. His work has been exhibited at MUMOK- Museum Moderner Kunst Stifung Ludwig, Vienna, the Carnegie Museum, Pittsburg; Pinakothek de Moderne, Munich; Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt am Main; The Whitney Museum, New York and The Metropolitan Museum, New York among other venues.